This year’s meeting was especially touching, because Max Blankfeld and Bennett Greenspan, founders of Family Tree DNA, received plaques for their 10 years of investment and dedication and as a thank you for hosting the conferences for administrators.

Much of today’s agenda was focused on research, technical updates and new products and features.

This next year, Family Tree DNA’s focus is on three initiatives:

Customer service and feedback

Features – listen to citizen scientists and group administrators

New products and features to make genetic genealogy better for genealogists

Family Tree DNA is actively soliciting your feedback and has set up a special address for suggestions. This takes you to a google docs file where you enter your name, e-mail and 1000 characters maximum.

In order to attract more uploads, which will, of course, give us more matches, Family Tree DNA is announcing free uploads from Ancestry and 23andMe, the v3 chip only, but with a string attached. The transferee can do the actual transfer for free, but they will only see their top 20 matches, only an initial and a last name, and will not be able to communicate with them unless they decide to pay $39 to join, or perhaps stated more accurately, to active all of the features of a paid transfer. However, in lieu of the $39 fee, you can also recruit 4 other people to upload their data, whether or not they actually pay the fee or not.

Search Feature

One of the reasons Family Tree DNA implemented the new trees was so that they could implement new search functionality. Soon, one will be able to search all public trees. I think this will benefit the community immensely, because it will allow people to see if people from their family lines are present in the data base, which will, hopefully, encourage testing.

Facilitating Communication

A new social media function called myGroups is being implemented to facilitate contact within groups. Today, projects and outside mailing lists and groups don’t fully overlap.

The example shown correlated to about 25% of a project group that was subscribed to an outside Yahoo group for discussion. MyGroups is designed to facilitate discussions that include all project members.

Furthermore, Ancestry’s My Family product became obsolete on September 30th, leaving many people with no place to discuss family lines and groups and share pictures and documents. The new myGroups is designed to replace some of that functionality within the context of a project. A project could be defined as an ancestral couple, for example or a surname project, or a haplogroup project. Of course, the discussions would be quite different for each type of myGroup. They are ready to launch this in an alpha state and if someone is excited about this and wants to volunteer, and can deal with a few bugs…then please drop Family Tree DNA a note.

News in the Field

We had many wonderful presentations, but my personal favorite was by Michael Hammer.

I can’t begin to do this topic justice without a real keyboard and a decent internet connection so I can upload lots of pictures. We now have 18 fully genome sequenced ancient DNA samples, which is, admittedly, just a smattering. However, if they are representative of the hunter-gatherer (Paleolithic) and early farmer (Neolithic) populations, then what we thought we knew about Y haplogroup R, J and others has just been turned upside down. And then, there is the teaser, like what is haplogroup C doing in Spain???

Oh, and want to know how much of your European DNA is ancestrally neolithic, hunter-gatherer, ancient northern european or later from the metallic age? That’s one of the features Family Tree DNA was asked about and I believe they said that was something they could probably do. I’m not positive if that means they will implement that feature, but I do know they’ll evaluate how difficult and accurate this would be to implement.

Join me in a few days, after I get home, when I promise, I’ll do Michael’s presentation justice. I’m so excited about ancient DNA and the secrets it’s unlocking!!!

I think the idea was to attract people who might not otherwise transfer because thy are concerned that they might not have any matches, or might not have matches they are interested in pursuing. Perhaps their curiosity will engage. More transferees mean more matches so I hope it works.